The Story Behind the Untitled Goose Game

gaming-stuff (64)in #gaming • 7 years ago (edited)

"Do you like hurting other people?"

-Richard (Hotline Miami)

So I mentioned about this funny little upcoming game before, the game about an asshole goose running around some old man's garden and screw his day. The untitled goose game but it announced already. Strange isn't it?Or could it be that's the title? "Untitled Goose Game"? It will get even more strange when you hear about how this idea even made, I'm telling you.

Actually, there's a video of the developer talk about this that you can watch here; Developer Talk about Untitled Goose Game. I don't put it here for a reason that probably not very nice of me to say here, and you'll know what it is if you watch it. So I decided to just write some of the points.

10.50 p.m.
Date unknown

In this vast multiverse, one's every actions and decisions, will lead one to winding paths with mysterious outcomes. Somehow, Stuart Gillespie-Cook, a game developer at House House, led himself to this point in his life at this particular night;

As you can see, it's a stock image... of a goose, with an idea following it "Let's make a game about this". How earnest. How honest. But he got no replies from his friends that night, only several hours of silence. Until 8.26 in the morning he just jumped back into it and somehow the whole crew became part of this idea as well.

So this game was started as a joke, an inside joke, but one that became a real thing over time through their friendly chatting time. They started to take the conversation into analyzing goose's anatomy, which was also part of the joke, to disturbing images of gooses with teeth on their tongue, memes, and news about goose incidents on the internet, which was about gooses causing public disturbance.

And it all ended with a real idea to make a game about being an asshole goose, titled "Untitled Goose Game design document v2: You're a goose and you're horrible to people." So the whole joking around was a company document. Very well put.

Long story short, their idea was put together in a tiny sandbox game where the player will play as a goose whose job is to mess someone's garden while the gardener will clean up the mess and put up with you no matter what. To be clearer about their hope for how the gameplay system will work, House House showed a video about a Chinese woman desperately put up with pandas that keep getting in her way while she cleaning up, without doing any harm.

For you who don't know about this goose game yet, here's the pre-alpha gameplay.

It's a game about a goose live only to be a jerk to an old man by causing ruckus in his little peaceful garden on a sunny day. With the stealthy mechanic the player will control the goose to do some goose-pionage actions such as moving things around like an asshole, snatching away the old man's stuff like an asshole, messing with the garden tools like an asshole, honking like an asshole, etc like an asshole.

But! There are objectives to complete. The to-do list that the goose have written neatly in connected upright letters is the game's objective that the player must complete, by distracting the old man by messing around with the objects in the game, which are all interactible.

Currently House House can't say when this Metal Goose Solid will be released and what features gonna be added in the final stage, it's still pretty vague. But they are planning to add more people and "some kind of storybook village" with the people that have interesting jobs for the goose to disturb.